Hi I was wondering if the Goblin harvester you get at level 90 tradeskill harvests materials for you while you are offline? Also can you have both the Goblin and Pony out to harvest for you at the same time? I saw a guide that says the pony will gather for only 2 hours at a time then you have to unload the harvest and send it out again. Is that the same for the Goblin as well?
Yes. They do harvest while you are offline. You can even desummon them and they'll keep on harvesting and you can unload them when you recast them. You can use both the goblin & pony at the same time. You do have to collect materials before you can send them out again, but they will just hang on to them until you do, you don't have to do it every 2 hours or whatever if you don't feel like it.
The fully trained pack pony can gather holiday harvests for you, the goblin cannot. The goblin has a chance to bring back rare harvest(s), the pony does not. Cyrrena
Quick amendment: The upgraded pack pony can also bring back rares. (You fully train/upgrade the pony by doing A Gathering Obsession: Beyond the Grave, which lets you get holiday harvests and rares.)
The only difference between the two is that the upgraded pony brings back holiday items during the holiday if you chose for it to do so. I'm absolutely sure that both bring back rares.
Lets be clear about this. Both the pony and the goblin take 2 hours to gather harvests before you can collect and send them out again. It doesn't matter if you are in game or not or on a different character, 2 real hours later the pony/goblin can be collected from. If you set up a rotation of crafters, you can collect quite a bit of materials for very little effort. The KA crafting quest series has a line where you ditch the goblin gatherer for other rewards. Most of us don't have the goblin anymore. Also to point out, the NPC harvesters don't bring back much in materials. Any player that gets 'serious' about harvesting can gather more than the NPC will bring back in about 30 minutes, an hour if there is competition for nodes.
And in particular the pony and goblin are pretty stingy with rares, it's a lot faster to equip all the items you can find that give a harvesting bonus and collect them yourself if you can.
YAY!!! I learn something new everyday. I have never actually seen a rare on my pony but I will look closer now. Thank you!! Cyrrena
Yet another quick amendment, the Kunark Ascending trade skill quest does remove the goblin, But it then replaces it with a harvesting buff on the same icon , which will allow you to harvest at an insane speed and with the in house harvest node, I feel it was a profitable trade off .
It gives you one rare harvest every 23 hours from the list of rares available from the shadeweave buds in Obulus Frontier: leathery shadeleaf, luclinite, shadebark, shadeweave root, shadow quartz, shadowstone ore. They can add up nicely if you have alts or are diligent about harvesting them. (No news yet on whether the plant will continue to be useful beyond KA.)
I haven't gotten that far myself but according to the Wiki it's: "a house item that allows daily harvesting of a rare item (like harvesting a Shadeweave bud at home)" http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Tree_of_Growf You also get "the ability to hire a Gardening Goblin brigand mercenary"
